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As the problem of debt grows more and more urgent in light of the
central role it plays in neoliberal capitalism, scholars have
analyzed debt using numerous approaches: historical analysis, legal
arguments, psychoanalytic readings, claims for reparations in
postcolonial debates, and more. Contributors to this special issue
of differences argue that these diverse approaches presuppose a
fundamental connection between indebtedness and narrative. They see
debt as a promise that refers to the future-deferred repayment that
purports to make good on a past deficit-which implies a narrative
in a way that other forms of exchange may not. The authors approach
this intertwining of debt and narration from the perspectives of
continental philosophy, international law, the history of slavery,
comparative literature, feminist critique, and more. Contributors.
Arjun Appadurai, Anthony Bogues, Emmanuel Bouju, Silvia Federici,
Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Raphaelle Guidee, Odette Lienau, Catherine
Malabou, Vincent Message, Laura Odello, Peter Szendy, Frederik
Tygstrup
Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described “a one hundred per
cent image-space.” Such an image space saturates our world now
more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The
Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that
populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and
general commodification of images and gazes. From the first
elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema
(the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary
eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our
eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the
intersection of the image and economics. The Supermarket of the
Visible elaborates an economy proper to images, icons, in other
words, an iconomy. Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote
that “money is the back side of all the images that cinema shows
and edits on the front.” Since “cinema,” for Deleuze, is
synonymous with “universe,” Szendy argues that this sentence
must be understood in its broadest dimension and that a reading of
key works in the history of cinema allows us a unique vantage point
upon the reverse of images, their monetary implications. Paying
close attention to sequences in Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De
Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy shows how cinema is not a uniquely
commercial art form among other, purer arts, but, more
fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might be called, with
Bataille, a general iconomy. Moving deftly and lightly between
political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular movies and
television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a necessary book
for anyone concerned with media, philosophy, politics, or visual
culture.
The visible world overflows with pictures: more than three billion
of them stream across social media every day. This overproduction
this excess needs to be managed. Images must be stored, formatted
and transported, their flow and exchange must be organised. They
require road networks (such as internet cables) and new forms of
labour (such as content moderators and clickworkers). And they
transform the way we see, mobilising our gaze as never before. The
essays and artworks in this catalogue, by observing similar
transformations currently affecting our financialised economy in
the age of cryptocurrencies, seek to grasp and theorise this new
iconomy of the visible. This exhibition catalogue is a collection
of short texts providing a wide range of perspectives on the
economics of the image and images of the economy. A number of
classic essays have also been reproduced, in part or in full.
Includes contributions from Emmanuel Alloa, Herve Aubron, Matthias
Bruhn, Yves Citton, Elena Esposito, Jean-Joseph Goux, Maurizio
Lazzarato, Catherine Malabou, Marta Ponsa, Marie Rebecchi, Antonio
Somaini, Peter Szendy, Leah Temper, Elena Vogman and Dork Zabunyan.
Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described "a one hundred per cent
image-space." Such an image space saturates our world now more than
ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket
of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it
as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general
commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and
escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great
conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking
techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter
Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the
image and economics. The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates an
economy proper to images, icons, in other words, an iconomy.
Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote that "money is the
back side of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the
front." Since "cinema," for Deleuze, is synonymous with "universe,"
Szendy argues that this sentence must be understood in its broadest
dimension and that a reading of key works in the history of cinema
allows us a unique vantage point upon the reverse of images, their
monetary implications. Paying close attention to sequences in
Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy
shows how cinema is not a uniquely commercial art form among other,
purer arts, but, more fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might
be called, with Bataille, a general iconomy. Moving deftly and
lightly between political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular
movies and television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a
necessary book for anyone concerned with media, philosophy,
politics, or visual culture.
Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox is an extraordinary foray into what
apple has convinced us is "the soundtrack of our lives." How does
music come to inhabit us, to possess and haunt us? What does it
mean that a piece of music can insert itself-Szendy's term for
this, borrowed from German, is the earworm-into our ears and minds?
In this book, Peter Szendy probes the ever-growing and ever more
global phenomenon of the hit song. Hits is the culmination of years
of singular attentiveness to the unheard, the unheard-of, and the
overheard, as well as of listening as it occurs when one pays
anything but attention. Szendy takes us through our musical bodies,
by way of members and instruments, playing and governing
apparatuses, psychic and cinematic doublings, political and
economic musings. The hit song, Szendy concludes, functions like a
myth, a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. In
the repetition generated by the song's relation to itself, Szendy
locates its production as a fetishized commodity, a self-producing
structure, and a self-desiring machine. Like a Deleuzian machine,
then, the hit song is a technology of the self, or better, a
technology of rule, a bio-melo-technology. After reading this book,
one can no longer avoid realizing that music is more than a
soundtrack: It is the condition of our lives. We are all
melomaniacs, Szendy tells us in his unique style of writing and of
thought. We are melo-obsessive subjects, not so much driven to a
frenzy by a music we hardly have time to listen to as governed and
ruled by it.
Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being
already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading
what reading is and what reading does. With Melville, Prophecies of
Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is
essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may
appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to
foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the
United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but
also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic
experience that Melville captured in a unique way. Reading,
according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to
come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for
the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy
suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael
says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body
politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques
Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it
also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to
reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text:
its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite
finitude of the text: that is what reading is about. In his
brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies
of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly
tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a
"pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other
thing."
The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a
seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory
surveillance: the NSA's warrantless wiretapping is merely the most
sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice
today. What is the source of this generalized principle of
eavesdropping? All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the
long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham's
"panacoustic" project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering
network called "Echelon." Together with this archeology of auditory
surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft's
representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce,
Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang,
Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of
Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of "overhearing" that
connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of
listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the
Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a
"split-hearing" that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance
into the death drive.
In this intimate meditation on listening, Peter Szendy examines
what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the
centuries. The role of the composer is clear, as is the role of the
musician, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to
the music s/he listens to? What is the responsibility of the
listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and
composer have copyright? Szendy explains his love of musical
arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone
listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other
ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music. How can
we share our actual hearing with others?Along the way, he examines
the evolution of copyright laws as applied to musical works and
takes us into the courtroom to examine different debates on what we
are and arenat allowed to listen to, and to witness the fine line
between musical borrowing and outright plagiarism. Finally, he
examines the recent phenomenon of DJs and digital compilations, and
wonders how technology has affected our habits of listening and has
changed listening from a passive exercise to an active one, whereby
one can jump from track to track or play only selected pieces.
In this intimate meditation on listening, Peter Szendy examines
what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the
centuries. The role of the composer is clear, as is the role of the
musician, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to
the music s/he listens to? What is the responsibility of the
listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and
composer have copyright? Szendy explains his love of musical
arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone
listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other
ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music. How can
we share our actual hearing with others? Along the way, he examines
the evolution of copyright laws as applied to musical works and
takes us into the courtroom to examine different debates on what we
are and aren’t allowed to listen to, and to witness the fine line
between musical borrowing and outright plagiarism. Finally, he
examines the recent phenomenon of DJs and digital compilations, and
wonders how technology has affected our habits of listening and has
changed listening from a passive exercise to an active one, whereby
one can jump from track to track or play only selected pieces.
"Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials." This phrase
could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction
(as one speaks of science fiction). What is revealed in the aliens
of which Kant speaks and he no doubt took them more seriously than
anyone else in the history of philosophy are the limits of
globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism.
Before engaging Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other
worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, this book
works its way through an analysis of the star wars raging above our
heads in the guise of international treaties regulating the law of
space, including the cosmopirates that Carl Schmitt sometimes
mentions in his late writings.
Turning to track the comings and goings of extraterrestrials in
Kant's work, Szendy reveals that they are the necessary condition
for an unattainable definition of humanity. Impossible to
represent, escaping any possible experience, they are nonetheless
inscribed both at the heart of the sensible and as an Archimedean
point from whose perspective the interweavings of the sensible can
be viewed.
Reading Kant in dialogue with science fiction films (films he seems
already to have seen) involves making him speak of questions now
pressing in upon us: our endangered planet, ecology, a war of the
worlds. But it also means attempting to think, with or beyond Kant,
what a point of view might be.
"Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials." This phrase
could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction
(as one speaks of science fiction). What is revealed in the aliens
of which Kant speaks and he no doubt took them more seriously than
anyone else in the history of philosophy are the limits of
globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism.
Before engaging Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other
worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, this book
works its way through an analysis of the star wars raging above our
heads in the guise of international treaties regulating the law of
space, including the cosmopirates that Carl Schmitt sometimes
mentions in his late writings.
Turning to track the comings and goings of extraterrestrials in
Kant's work, Szendy reveals that they are the necessary condition
for an unattainable definition of humanity. Impossible to
represent, escaping any possible experience, they are nonetheless
inscribed both at the heart of the sensible and as an Archimedean
point from whose perspective the interweavings of the sensible can
be viewed.
Reading Kant in dialogue with science fiction films (films he seems
already to have seen) involves making him speak of questions now
pressing in upon us: our endangered planet, ecology, a war of the
worlds. But it also means attempting to think, with or beyond Kant,
what a point of view might be.
Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often
been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After
Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play
with general annihilation while also paying close attention to
films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve
Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film
gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and
with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the
film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema,
in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic
horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling
radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but
other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy
of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white,
its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is
not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions
of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that,
every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the
cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a Postface
specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his
argument into a debate with speculative materialism.
Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that
question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The
cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic
structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique,
allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.
What if our existence is a product of its interruptions? What if
the words that structure our lives are themselves governed by the
periods and commas that bring them to a close, or our images by the
cinematic cuts that mark them off? Are we, like Chekhov's clerk,
who dreams of being pursued by angry exclamation marks, or
Scorsese's Jake LaMotta, bloodied by one violently edited fight
after another, the products of punctuation-or as Peter Szendy asks
us to think of it, punchuation? Of Stigmatology elaborates for the
first time a general theory of punctuation. Beginning with
punctuation marks in the common sense, Peter Szendy goes on to
trace the effects of punctuation more broadly, arguing that looking
and hearing are not passive acts of reception, but themselves
punctuate the images and sounds they take in. Szendy reads an
astonishing range of texts and traditions, from medical
auscultation to literature (Chekhov, Sterne, Kafka), philosophy
(Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and
film (Raging Bull, The Trial, Fight Club). Repeatedly, what Szendy
finds in these works is a punctuation that marks experience itself,
that seeks (and ultimately fails) to bind the subject to itself.
This is the stigmatology of the punctuation mark on the page that
structures texts from ancient to digital, as well as the
punchuation of experience, as though at the hands of a boxer.
What if our existence is a product of its interruptions? What if
the words that structure our lives are themselves governed by the
periods and commas that bring them to a close, or our images by the
cinematic cuts that mark them off? Are we, like Chekhov's clerk,
who dreams of being pursued by angry exclamation marks, or
Scorsese's Jake LaMotta, bloodied by one violently edited fight
after another, the products of punctuation-or as Peter Szendy asks
us to think of it, punchuation? Of Stigmatology elaborates for the
first time a general theory of punctuation. Beginning with
punctuation marks in the common sense, Peter Szendy goes on to
trace the effects of punctuation more broadly, arguing that looking
and hearing are not passive acts of reception, but themselves
punctuate the images and sounds they take in. Szendy reads an
astonishing range of texts and traditions, from medical
auscultation to literature (Chekhov, Sterne, Kafka), philosophy
(Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and
film (Raging Bull, The Trial, Fight Club). Repeatedly, what Szendy
finds in these works is a punctuation that marks experience itself,
that seeks (and ultimately fails) to bind the subject to itself.
This is the stigmatology of the punctuation mark on the page that
structures texts from ancient to digital, as well as the
punchuation of experience, as though at the hands of a boxer.
Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being
already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading
what reading is and what reading does. With Melville, Prophecies of
Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is
essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may
appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to
foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the
United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but
also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic
experience that Melville captured in a unique way. Reading,
according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to
come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for
the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy
suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael
says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body
politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques
Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it
also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to
reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text:
its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite
finitude of the text: that is what reading is about. In his
brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies
of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly
tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a
"pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other
thing."
The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a
seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory
surveillance: the NSA's warrantless wiretapping is merely the most
sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice
today. What is the source of this generalized principle of
eavesdropping? All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the
long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham's
"panacoustic" project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering
network called "Echelon." Together with this archeology of auditory
surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft's
representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce,
Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang,
Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of
Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of "overhearing" that
connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of
listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the
Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a
"split-hearing" that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance
into the death drive.
Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often
been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After
Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play
with general annihilation while also paying close attention to
films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve
Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film
gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and
with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the
film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema,
in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic
horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling
radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but
other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy
of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white,
its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is
not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions
of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that,
every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the
cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a Postface
specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his
argument into a debate with speculative materialism.
Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that
question the “ultratestimonial” structure of the filmic gaze.
The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and
anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed
under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.
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